New books this Fall

"The great thing about being ostracized is there's no peer pressure." Jean is the ultimate outsider. With a white father and Asian mother, she is too dark to be considered "white" and too white to be considered anything else. She catches grief from whites and minorities alike as she tries to piece together clues from her ancestry among a predominantly white populace. This personal anthology is composed of a series of telling moments. Headed by popular songs, each carefully crafted short story and essay provides humor, drama and powerful insight into the changing face of America. "One Asian Eye fills two important gaps in Asian American literature: accounts of the condition of being multiracial and literature in any genre about growing up in the Midwest.
 

Focuses on the field of evolutionary psychology. This second edition offers a logical progression of topics by discussing adaptive problems that humans face. It integrates material on cognition and language throughout the text. It includes stories, media and cultural examples and illustrations, and applications to the personal lives of students.
 

This pioneering survey of court cultures in the age of the High Baroque through to the age of Enlightenment uses the role of the queen consort as the principal means of inquiry. The principal themes explored are the consort's formal and informal power, her religious role, and her cultural patronage. The book reveals the dynamics of dynastic politics as courts used their family linkages to advance themselves in the hierarchy of European powers, and suggests how women sometimes formed their own networks. The courts surveyed include those of France, Spain, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, the Imperial court at Vienna, and the three German electorates linked to monarchies: Brandenburg-Prussia, Saxony-Poland and Hanover-Great Britain. Also included is the duchy of Württemburg, which achieved royal status by the end of the period, and Savoy, which attained it through acquiring Piedmont at the beginning.

 

A history of the struggle in both the church and the state over the issue of slavery and the roles they played in events leading to the Civil War. The author chronicles the domestic missions in Calvinist churches in the antebellum period, linking free-soil concepts with post-millenialist thought.

 

The essays in this book deal broadly with the question of what form reasoning about life and society can take in a culture permeated by scientific and technical modes of thought. They attempt to identify certain very basic types of questions that seem to escape scientific resolution and call for, in Gadamer's view, philosophical reflection of a hermeneutic sort. In effect, Gadamer argues for the continued practical relevance of Socratic-Platonic modes of thought in respect to contemporary issues. These essays, which are not available in any existing translation or collection of Gadamer's work, are remarkably up-to-date with respect to the present state of his thinking, and they address issues that are particularly critical to social theory and philosophy. He is recognized as the chief theorist of hermeneutics, a strong and growing movement here in a number of disciplines, from theology and literary criticism to philosophy and social theory. A book in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought.